Paris_ View of Rue Saint-Honoré 1865

Charles Marville made this albumen print of the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, most likely in the 1860s. The photograph captures a quiet moment in the life of a bustling commercial street. Marville was hired by the city of Paris to document the streets before they were demolished and rebuilt. The rebuilding of Paris was a vast public works project intended to modernize the city and improve public health, but also to make it easier for the government to control the population. The old, narrow streets were seen as breeding grounds for disease and also as ideal places for revolutionaries to build barricades. As a result, the reconstruction of Paris was controversial, with some people seeing it as a necessary step forward and others seeing it as a destructive act of social engineering. Marville’s photographs, then, are not simply neutral documents, but are implicated in the politics of urban change. Examining the city archives, newspapers, and political pamphlets of the period helps us understand the context in which Marville was working and to appreciate the complexities of his images.